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The French government has given one of the company's exchanges permission to operate as a payment service provider there.

Bitcoin, the occasionally frightening virtual currency that doesn't believe in government regulation, just got itself some. One of its exchanges, Bitcoin-Central, has received approval from France's government to operate as a payment service provider there, PayPal-style. With that relationship comes some insurance protection that should help get people trusting Bitcoin again. Before now, when things like $250,000 heistswent down, these exchanges didn't have any government back-up to pay back users' stolen funds. As a PSP, the money stored with Bitcoin-Central will get backed by the same European compensation laws as money held in normal banks.

That should make signing up a little less terrifying of an experience for people who don't want to watch their money be subject to hackings and fraud, a common but hard-to-track occurrence in the Bitcoin world. Often, these heists amount to no small sum. At this point one bitcoin is worth about $13 U.S. dollars.